MAMBO fails to build on Arch Linux about mambo

[ijan1]

Hi Igor,

I don't think there's a clean way to handle this other than having cases for handling disto-specific package quirks, like not providing a static library.
Although, from reading around it does seems like that dynamically linked libraries are preferred by package managers.[1]
While I couldn't find something more authorative, the whole Arch Linux page for Haskell does seem to mention that the packages provided by Arch are dynamically linked, whereas GHC is set-up for static compilation by default which seems to lead to a lot of frustration for Haskell devs.[2][3]

Debian (and Ubuntu by extension) seems to be leaning towards the same idea of providing dynamically linked libraries first, and then providing the static ones in a separate -dev package together with the header files.[4] So Debian-based distros are at least guaranteed to have a statically compiled version of the libraries we are using.

As for the more practical concerns; having Mambo be dynamically compiled by default is fine, if there's no big performance regressions. I don't know if there's any plans of providing precompiled binaries, in which case being able to statically compile to avoid DLL hell would be nice for distribution purposes.
In the case of a performance regression, a possibility would be to provide the dependencies ourselves, like PIE.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/7jyie0/the_arch_linux_community_does_not_look_very_about/draeoji/
[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/haskell#Configuration
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/gutkbu/setting_up_haskell_devel_environment_on_arch/
[4] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html#static-libraries